Tag: linux

I ran into the error Cannot open your terminal '/dev/pts/0'. Though I had not seen this before, it seems to occur when you use the “switch user (su)” command to access a user account and then try to open a screen.

The issue can be resolved by either logging in directly with the user account you want to use, or by running the command “script /dev/null” as demonstrated here on StackOverflow.

I had been backing up a MySQL database with a simple shell script for a while now. What I somehow forgot to add to the script was a command to compress the SQL dumps before uploading them to my backup server. The script had been running for a few months, so manually compressing each file wasn’t much of an option. So I wrote this little shell script do the work for me.

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#!/bin/sh

cd/some/directory/with/sql/files

forfile in*.sql;do

tar cvzf"${file}".tar.gz"${file}"

rm"${file}"

done

The script places all of the sql files individually into a tar archive with GZip compression. The new file uses the old file’s name with “.tar.gz” appended at the end. The old file is deleted after the compressed archive has been created.

You can of course do this for other files, just change the *.sql mask to work with different files. If for some reason you just want TAR files without the GZip compression, replace the tar line in the script with “tar cvf "${file}".tar "${file}"“.

If you are running an Ubuntu (or other linux) commandline interface, you might have to check how much diskspace is available on the system. You can easily have the system output a list of the disk space usage on all mounted filesystems with the command df -h.

The output depends completely on how your system is set up, but it will look something like:

Elementary OS 0.2 Jupiter is the first stable release of Elementary OS and was release just over 10 days ago. I’ve been using the OS on one of my production machines for a week now and I’d like to share some of my thought about the OS.

Elementary OS is an Ubuntu remix, though things aren’t all that different. The only real difference between Ubuntu and Elementary OS is the interface. Elementary OS uses a custom built shell that runs on top of Gnome. The shell is clearly designed to resemble Mac OSX. The interface looks very sleek and tidy, is very responsive and overall I must say that it works really well.

As for functionality, the interface unfortunately doesn’t really add any, at the bottom of your desktop you will see a dock such as in Max OSX, opened programs will show up on the dock and you can easily stick them to do the dock to quick launch them. Aside from the dock, the interface seems to actually reduce the functionality of the Ubuntu desktop environment. The Desktop itself is completely gone, you can no longer put any files or folders onto the desktop and aside from this you no longer have multiple desktop support.

The OS still has a couple of bugs to iron out, often folders like Documents won’t launch and there’s a few other minor bugs.

Overall even though there’s some reduced functionality and small bugs, I must say I’m very satisfied with this new distro, the new interface looks very clean and is fun to use, it reduces that basic feel to Gnome while retaining the performance.

Note that you can use Ubuntu Tweak to bring back a lot of the functionality that was removed.